Wicca
is a rapidly growing religious
movement, which is a modern day version of ancient religious precepts
that
far predates both Judaism and Christianity, and whose basic tenets and
beliefs go back to the earliest days of humanity. From the time
religious
thought was first conceived, early humanity was fascinated with the
concept
of female power, as only women had the ability to reproduce.

Before
men realized their role in reproduction,
ancient societies were largely matriarchal, based on the awe that men
held
towards women, who were seen as the life-givers of the fledging human
race.
As a result, early human spirituality revered an all-female conception
of Deity, a Goddess, which represented fertility to the nascent human
species.
Many early paintings, carvings and statues depict this early Mother
Goddess,
which includes a bloated womb and enlarged breasts, obviously in honor
of women's ability to reproduce humanity, and intended for use in
fertility
rites.

Women
also had the important role of
educating the children, forming the rudiments of language, leading the
tribe's religious rites and probably formulating the early cultural
mores
and taboos of these early, pre-industrial gentile societies. As a
result,
the Mother Goddess came to embody intellect and the arts as well.

Since
the men were considered more expendable,
they were relegated to the important but extremely dangerous task of
hunting.
They would often wear animal skin with antlers or stag horns on top to
get close to a herd of bison or antelope. This led to the eventual
creation
of a male aspect of Deity, the God of the Hunt. He was depicted as
having
horns and hooves (and sometimes other animal characteristics, such as a
tail), to exemplify his connection with nature, and was modeled on the
appearance of the disguised hunters. This image of the Horned God was
later
severely bastardized by the Roman Catholic Church into the evil entity
known as the Devil, or 'Satan.'

When
horticulture and later, agriculture,
eventually supplanted hunting as the main form of sustenance for the
tribe,
the God of the Hunt became the God of Agriculture, and the image of the
Green Man, visually represented as a male face in the form of foliage,
came into being in some societies (and remains a fairly familiar image
in the British Isles to this day), and the replacement of antler and
stag
horns with goat horns came to personify the God. This later led to such
god-forms as the Greco-Roman Pan (and his horde of satyr brethren) and
the Celtic Cernnunos.

Still,
the female Goddess was held in
higher prominence than the God. During these early days of humanity, it
is believed by modern archaeologists that many rituals were performed
to
the Mother Goddess, primarily to insure the fertility of the tribe's
women
and possibly also to heal the sick, and the God was probably called
upon
in these rituals to increase the abundance of game for the hunters and
to increase the success of the hunt itself (early cave paintings by
Cro-Magnon
tribes clearly depict the hunting rituals, showing the tribe members
dancing
while dressed in animal skins, the leader or "high priest" of the
ritual
disguised in fur and horns to play the role of the Horned God). Later,
the God was probably called upon ritually to insure a good and healthy
crop for the tribe. These early exercises in what is today referred to
as magick greatly evolved in scope and purpose over time, and early
societies
eventually developed rituals designed to utilize the energy inherent in
nature into granting people whatever they desired, personally as well
as
collectively for the entire community or tribe. In its earliest days,
people
utilized magickal ritual for primarily communal purposes, beginning
with,
for example, a good supply of game for the hunt (as described above)
and,
after the agricultural revolution, for favorable crop in the planting
seasons.
As time passed, and human society became more and more complex, the
original
monotheistic Goddess, and the latter duo theistic reverence of the
Goddess
and God, were sub-divided into numerous different deities, both female
and male, all of which represented a different culturally significant
aspect
of the society's lives and ethics (i.e., a god/dess of wisdom, love,
combat,
writing, etc.), and thus religious structure became more polytheistic.

The
early simple folk magick would eventually
evolve into more complex rituals for personal use, for individuals to
gain
things such as health, love and material wealth, finally becoming what
we know today as Witchcraft, Ceremonial Magick and many other forms.

When
the primitive communistic societies
were eventually replaced by private property and class-divided
societies,
men slowly began to seize power, particularly after learning of their
role
in reproduction.

However,
the early Pagan religions still
reigned supreme in these new economies, and the Goddess and God were
given
many personalities comprising numerous different aspects of each
society.
Thus, as described above, the Goddess and God were subdivided into
different
pantheons of lesser gods and goddesses that embodied various aspects
that
were culturally significant to a given society.

For
example, each society had a god/goddess
of war, of love, of agriculture, of prosperity and commerce, of the
sea,
of death, etc. The richest pantheons belong to the Greeks/Romans,
Norse/Germanic,
Celtic, Egyptians, Native Americans, Japanese, Africans, and many
others.
Several of these pantheons of gods and goddesses are still revered
today
by various Pagan religions (the subject of these beings being real
entities
or merely metaphorical subdivisions of the Goddess and God will be the
focus of another section).

Many
of these societies, particularly
the Celtics and Norse, held women in high regard in society and their
goddesses
had every bit as much importance as the male deities. However, towards
the end of the Roman Empire, the monotheistic, patriarchal religious
tendency
known as Christianity began, and it grew from a relatively small group
of religious rebels led by the great prophet Jesus Christ into a huge
political
power base. This new religion worshiped an all male personification of
a single Deity, and it eventually fully established the patriarchal
society
that we still see (albeit to an increasingly lesser degree) today.

Note
on Monotheism

The
concept of monotheism wasn't new
during the twilight years of the Roman Empire. It was first envisioned
much earlier by the Egyptian pharaoh Achnaton (also sometimes referred
to as Amenhotep IV in the history books) during the 18th Dynasty of
Egypt,
and he called this single all-male conception of Deity Aton. This began
the original mistake of monotheism, the ousting of the female aspect of
Deity from the consciousness of its followers, and made the social
concept
of a patriarchy far more acceptable to its adherents; it rejected the
concept
of duotheism, which would have given equal respect to the female aspect
of divinity. It should be noted that it's very curious that neither
Achnaton
nor Christ envisioned a gender neutral conception of a single Deity (as
a few open-minded Christians are slowly beginning to do today), which
would
have prevented a huge amount of the social strife and disempowerment
that
women have suffered from in the following centuries up to the present
day.

The
worship of Aton eventually fell
out of favor in Egypt, and a return to polytheism was instituted. Most
major re-evaluations of religious thought, as well as the creation of
new
and radical religions, occur during times of social, economic and
political
turmoil, such as when a particularly powerful nation-state or
socio-economic
order is dying out. Egypt wasn't in too major a situation in this
regard
at the time of the 18th Dynasty, or Achnaton's cult may have gone much
further, and modern day monotheists may be invoking his name as their
holy
savior rather than Christ, and still referring to their conception of
Deity
as "Aton" (or an anglicized variation thereof) instead of simply
"God."

However,
when Christ began his religious mission and started gathering
his Apostles during the final days of the Roman Empire, his timing
couldn't
have been better, for it was a time when the world economic order, then
based on chattel slavery, was collapsing (to soon be replaced by a new
world economic order, feudalism) and the political structure and social
stability of Rome was becoming chaotic. Many new religious orders in
addition
to Christianity, such as the cult of Diana, began forming, which is
similar
to the phenomenon of bizarre cults (such as the ill-fated cult of David
Koresh) and new religions (such as the resurgence in Pagan faiths like
Wicca, Asatru and Druidism) which are appearing today, and slowly
growing
and thriving, now that the current economic world order, capitalism, is
likewise starting to collapse, and much political and social turmoil is
occurring as the established norms and religions of our society are now
slowly being questioned by an increasingly disheartened population.

Had
Christ been born in the Heroic Age
of Greece during its stable economic period, his then radical religious
ideas would probably have gone nowhere, and Christianity may have ended
up as a forgotten footnote in history. The success of virtually all new
religious movements have always been dependent on the social, political
and economic circumstances of the nation-state and time period in
question
in which they appeared. Jesus Christ was obviously inspired by the
earlier,
albeit temporary, success of Achnaton, in attempting to create a
religion
centered around a single universal male Deity, only this time the new
God
image was conceived as being totally good (the new monotheistic Deity's
petty, human-like qualities, and his totally evil counterpart Satan,
were
added much later, once the Roman Catholic Church fully entered its
political
stage during the feudal era, and Satan was retroactively inserted into
the history of Jesus by the writers of the Bible to establish this
being's
legitimacy as a "threat" to the devout followers of Christianity).
Judaism
and Islam, as well as Christianity, owe a tip of the hat to Achnaton
and
his religious conception, even though none of these three dominant
religious
tendencies acknowledges his "contribution" to their particular
conception
of Deity and world history today.

There
are even rumors that a very old
and long vanished cult that predated the Pagan civilization of
Sumeria/Mesopotamia,
the oldest recorded human civilization accepted as authentic by all
modern
archeologists, had established a monotheistic faith around an all-male
Deity called Mithra, and this was expounded upon in the fictional
fantasy
novels written by Robert E. Howard about the "Hyborian Age," an era
posited
to exist about 10,000 years ago, and whose authenticity has yet to be
accepted
by modern historians, and it is not known if Achnaton's society would
have
had any knowledge of the Mithra cult, which may or may not be the
earliest
conception of all-male monotheism in human history, as well as an
unknown
major example of monotheism in human history, but that doesn't change
the
fact that Achnaton created the first monotheistic religious tendency to
be very well documented in history, and would have been known to Roman
historians during the time of Jesus, who was quite well educated, as
well
as a reported master of psychic abilities.

The
new monotheistic Christian religion
of Catholicism, which became a powerful political force after the fall
of the slave economies and the rise of feudalism, co-existed with Pagan
religions for many centuries, and finally waged a brutal war to stamp
out
all vestiges of these older religions in a conflict known as the
Crusades.
The Roman Catholic Church perverted the word "Pagan," which derives
from
the Latin word paganus, and literally translates into "country
dweller,"
into meaning an anti-Christian and "unbeliever." Today, many people
still
incorrectly believe the word to be synonymous with atheism, or the
belief
in no Deity or deities of any kind, with a strict adherence to
scientific
materialism, and total rejection of all aspects of spirituality and
metaphysics.

The
Goddess was excised from the religious
consciousness of the masses, to resurface later to the Roman Catholics
in the subordinate role of the Virgin Mary. Jesus Christ himself was
deified,
his teachings perverted and his image transformed into the "son of
God."
He became the Christian equivalent of the Sun God, an old Pagan
tradition
of a beloved male deity born to the Mother Goddess who is killed and
resurrected
after death (important Pagan Sun Gods include Dionysus/Bacchus
[Greek/Roman],
Balder [Norse] and Osiris [Egyptian]). The Pagan image of the Horned
God
was transformed into the visualized appearance of "Satan," or the
Devil,
the evil being and avowed enemy of the Christian God, who only "evil"
people
(i.e., non-Christians) worshiped, and who had allegedly dedicated his
metaphysical existence to totally undermining and destroying the moral
turpitude of loyal Christians.

Pagan
attitudes such as openness of
sex and reverence for women were drastically attacked in order to keep
the masses under the control of the Church clergy. Now, sex and nudity
were considered sinful and abhorrent to the new God image, and women
became
little more than property to the males, becoming third class citizens,
losing all property rights and unable to serve in the clergy until the
20th century (at this time, the beginning of the 21st century, women
still
cannot serve as priests in the Roman Catholic religion, today still the
most influential of all Christian denominations, though the politically
right wing fundamentalist "born again" Christians, such as Pat
Robertson
and his ilk, are becoming very influential nowadays as well).

These
aforementioned alterations in
the cultural mindset, particularly in America and England, continue to
a lesser degree into the present time. Beginning roughly in the 11th
century,
the Christian knights known as the Crusaders began storming across the
Western and Northern world to convert all Pagan tribes to Christianity
through sheer brute force and violence, and making the way safe for the
missionaries of the Church to come in and "re-educate" the survivors of
the carnage. However, certain small groups of Pagans survived in remote
areas and in the smallest villages, and continued to practice the "old"
ways in relative secrecy, despite the mass destruction of the major
rich
Pagan cultures such as the Druids (the religious priesthood of the
Keltoi,
or Celts) and the Norsemen (or Vikings). By the late 15th century,
however,
Witchcraft officially became illegal, and the Church stopped at nothing
to eradicate it from the Western world completely. The people were told
that Satan was hiding around every corner, waiting to seduce innocent
and
devout Christians to his "evil" ways, and that the Church had to take
drastic
measures to stamp out the menace at all costs.

This created one of the
first of the many politically motivated social hysteria to occur in the
New World, and was the origination of the term "witch-hunting," and
gave
the ruling class of the time an excuse to trample on the civil rights
of
society at large [this is very similar to the many hysteria engendered
by the American government and media, such as the white slavery
hysteria
of the 1890's-1900's, the "Communist" and homosexual hysteria of the
1950's,
and the pedophile and terrorist hysteria of the present era, which
proves
that social terror tactics are used by our current government in a very
similar manner to the theocratic societies of the past, and for the
same
purpose...creating a public hysteria and inflated "menace" that is so
severe
and terrifying, the masses are told, that drastic measures, i.e.,
harsher
laws, stronger police powers and erosions of our much sought after
civil
rights must be enacted to stamp out the menace, and the panic-stricken
general public happily complies and even participates with a large
amount
of finger-pointing and using the new laws to their advantage to ruin
the
lives of people they dislike, the same as the people of the earlier
centuries
did in accusing folks they disliked of Witchcraft...how little things
change
over time].

Over
the next two hundred years, people
across Europe and America were put to death en masse merely for being
suspected
of practicing Witchcraft, which was purported to support the infamous
Christian
political bogeyman, Satan. Most of these individuals were definitely
not
even truly Pagans, but were devout Christians who were merely accused
of
being Pagans, often by jealous and spiteful neighbors with a personal
vendetta.
These unfortunates were subjected to some of the most brutal and
horrific
tortures ever inflicted by one human against another, and they were
forced
to confess to the charges, after which they were summarily executed for
the crime they "confessed" to, and most were either hung or burned
alive
at the stake (others were killed by dismemberment, drowning, further
torture
and other equally unpleasant means). Further, the terror tactics were
not
only used to wipe out the last vestiges of Paganism by the Church, but
also to attack practitioners of emerging rival Christian sects, such as
the Protestants, many of whom were tortured and murdered after being
accused
of practicing Witchcraft while visiting a Catholic village; the
in-fighting
between different Christian denominations also caused much chaos upon
American
and English society at the time.

This
murderous and insane anti-Paganism
crusade created one of the earliest of the many "holocausts" in the New
World. All of the few remaining real Pagans were understandably driven
into hiding, and Paganism and Witchcraft (as well as the practice of
almost
all magick) was driven far underground and more or less eliminated from
the public awareness by the end of the 17th century, and was completely
discredited further from the materialist Scientific Revolution that
emerged
fully in the past four centuries, after the end of the Renaissance. For
the most part, the Crusades succeeded in converting most of the Western
and Northern world to Christianity (despite often violent resistance by
the Pagans), leaving nothing more than small, scattered groups and a
handful
of solitary practitioners of Paganism alive in the remote countryside,
and the Inquisition more or less completed the task of the Church by
ensuring
that the few remaining Pagans were driven so far underground in fear
and
hiding that they simply vanished from the world scene with no one to
pass
the "old" religion on to.

The
several claims in the 20th century
by both academic scholars and Neo-Pagans that a few witches survived
and
passed on their lineage to the present day are nothing more than
unproved
rumors, and it can unfortunately be said that the Church did it's
grisly
job quite well. Confirmation of this is the fact that when the laws
against
Witchcraft were finally repealed in the 18th century, and when the U.S.
Constitution was written, which guaranteed religious freedom in the
newly
formed nation of America, no "underground" members of the Pagan
religion
emerged from hiding to set the record straight. Christian beliefs,
values
and cultural mores (not to mention the laws inspired by them) were just
too ingrained into the mindset of the citizens of this new nation,
including
the incorrect and stereotypical beliefs of Pagans being evil "devil
worshipers,"
the Mother Goddess image lived on only in the extremely subordinate
image
of the Virgin Mary, the Horned God image was believed to be analogous
to
the Christian image of Satan, the old polytheistic deities were now
considered
to be mere objects of myth, and women, who were often mainstays of the
Pagan societies, were legally and culturally servile to the men of the
new nation.

Thus,
if a tiny handful of Pagans truly remained in existence
as rumors have suggested, they understandably remained deeply in
hiding.
It wasn't until the mid-20th century, when a new generation of Pagans
would
emerge and challenge the still dominating but slowly declining
Christian
mindset, that the "old" religion in a new guise returned to lay claim
to
the belief systems of the Western and Northern worlds once more. Hence,
even this new nation, with "religious freedom" written into law, was
not
considered a safe place for the "old" religion, as dominated as it was
in both culture and laws by Christian doctrine (some of the American
laws,
however, such as the idea of a bourgeois democracy, were acquired from
the Athenian society of ancient Greece, and the concept of a speedy
trial
by jury and other legal procedures, such as due process, which was an
ideal
utilized by the Norsemen, were indeed of Pagan origin; the women's
liberation
movement of the Civil Rights era in the late 20th century was a
regaining
of rights that were common to the female gender in most of the Pagan
societies).
Hence, by the end of the Inquisition late in the 17th century, the
Church
believed that all vestiges of the old Pagan religion was successfully
defeated,
and the brutal attempt to stomp out the influence of “Satan” was
relaxed
to a large extent. However, despite this defeat of Paganism, it wasn't
the permanent end of the "old" religion .

19th
Century through Contemporary

In
the late 19th century, the Spiritualist
movement, the birth of a new science known as parapsychology and the
formation
of non-traditional religions such as Theosophy (formed by the eccentric
mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky, and which exists to this day) began
renewing
interest in the occult, and Christianity was slowly being challenged,
but
not to a major extent in the 19th century.

In
the year 1921, Dr. Margaret Murrary
wrote a book entitled The Witch Cult in Western Europe, which
officially
identified Witchcraft as an ancient fertility religion that had no
connection
to Satan and devil-worship, thus challenging a common and cruel
misconception
rampant in our still Christian society. She followed this up ten years
later (1931) by a second book, The God of the Witches, where she made
claims
that the religion remained in an unbroken line to this day (these
claims
have never been substantiated, and are controversial). In 1951, the
last
of the old Witchcraft laws in England were repealed (and the last of
these
mostly dealt with matters of fraud, anyway).

In
1954, the modern Wiccan, and perhaps
the modern Neo-Pagan movement and "New Age" in general, began with the
publication of Gerald Gardner's book Witchcraft Today. Here he revealed
himself to be a witch, and that he was in fact initiated into a coven
of
a long line of witches (a claim that is now being disputed heavily by
even
the Pagan community). Nevertheless, despite some of Gardner's more
questionable
claims, his book introduced the name Wicca to the public, which is
alternately
described as meaning "craft of the wise" or taken from the Celtic
phrase
"to bend." Gardnerian was the first Wiccan tradition to take root in
Europe
and America, and it was soon followed by other prominent branches, such
as Alexandrian, Dianic and Eclectic (which is actually a
'non-tradition'),
to be followed in the 60's by a resurgence of interest in Celtic and
Norse
deities in particular, leading to Wiccan traditions centered around
them
(Norse Wicca, despite its reverence of the Norse deities, has no
connection
with another growing Pagan religion, Asatru, which keeps the old
religion
of the Vikings alive and worships the Norse Gods, just as Celtic Wicca
has no connection to the ancient Pagan religion of Druidism, which
worships
the Celtic Gods, and is now also enjoying a resurgence in the West).

By
the 1970's, Wicca had developed into
one of the fastest growing religious movements in an era of many people
who are determined to cast off the encroachments of Judeo-Christian
society
and its continued attacks on sexual freedom, women's liberation, youth
liberation (a budding movement in its infancy that even not all Pagans
yet ascribe to, which will ultimately lead to the re-extension of civil
rights to youths, who are doing much to help the growth of Wicca; youth
liberation should be a major focus for Wiccans today, but the movement
has only recently begun).

Also,
Asatru arrived on American shores
in the 70's, and a resurgence of Druidism also began to emerge
beginning
in the late 80's, thus increasing the spread of Paganism in general
across
our still largely Judeo-Christian society. This once unchallenged set
of
virtues is now once again being questioned by more progressive-minded
religious
tendencies, despite its lack of official organization and its
separation
into many different traditions.

As
the 20th century is now officially
over, all of the Pagan religions, including the many Wiccan traditions
(as well as others, such as Asatru and Neo-Druidism) are now continuing
to grow in number. It may well be that the 21st century will become the
era when the Pagan religions again come of age, and eventually cast off
the domination of the Judeo-Christian mindset which still rules America
and England.